


Good at Love

by bitboozy



Series: Domesticated [11]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Family, Love is hard, Romance, but it never lasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 13:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20192965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitboozy/pseuds/bitboozy
Summary: The night she asks to sleep apart, he doesn’t sleep at all.





	Good at Love

The night she asks to sleep apart, he doesn’t sleep at all.

He drinks cup upon cup of tea. He paces every room in the house. He tries to distract himself with _The Handmaid’s Tale_, his unexpected obsession, but he can’t concentrate on anything that’s happening. 

He replays the day in his mind. He knows he was bold, but she hadn’t seemed to mind at all in the moment. For awhile, he blames Beth. He’s sure she must have come out against the relationship and filled Ellie’s heart and mind with displaced guilt and anxiety. But then he remembers that Ellie is very much her own person, and very much in control of her own heart and mind. He can blame no one. Except, perhaps, himself. 

At work, she’s quiet but polite. This drives him crazier than if she were to ignore him entirely. He doesn’t know what to do with a tacit, reserved Ellie Miller. Around noon, he asks her if she wants to get lunch. She says no, she has too much paperwork to do. All of CID can feel an uncomfortable darkness settling in.

Mid-afternoon, he calls her into his office and closes the door behind her.

“All right, what, then?” He demands, though with little power, hands on his hips. “I know I’m not the most emotionally bloody observant man in all of human history, but even I can see you’re mad at me.”

“”m not,” she insists, with a vague shrug of her shoulders. “Honestly.”

“Then what the hell’s going on, El?” He feels controlled by his desperation and doesn’t like it one single bit.

“Nothing.” She shrugs again. “Just a bit tired today is all.”

He softens a bit. “…Didn’t sleep last night either, eh?”

“No, I did. Asleep before ten, actually, thanks to Luce keeping the boys over,” she replies. “Good to catch up on rest a bit but I’m still knackered.”

There’s that baby grand on his chest again. He takes a deep breath, then doesn’t know what to do with it.

“What can I do, Ellie?” He’s rubbing the back of his neck, and he hates how obvious his distress must be.

“’Bout what?”

“Oh, fuck’s sake, just come out with it, will you? Tell me what I did so I can _fix _it.”

There’s that shrug of her shoulders again. “You’ve not done anything, Alec. Just feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment.”

She heads for the door. He feels his heart leaping out after her. “Ellie – “

But she’s gone before his heart can reach her.

After that, he begins to slam doors, drawers, and cabinets. Much more irritable than usual, he snaps at the DCs, and even once at Jenkinson. Then he locks himself in his office, blinds closed, until about 8pm when everyone else is gone.

Back at home, he finds Daisy doing her homework at the kitchen table. She’s a sight for _very _sore eyes. She heats him up some leftovers, and he sits quietly at the table with her, eating as she continues her school work.

“When’s Ellie coming by?” Daisy asks finally. “After Fred’s down?”

“Dunno,” he replies, shoving a forkful of shepherd’s pie into his mouth. “Doubt we’ll be seein’ her tonight.”

Daisy thinks for a moment, then smiles a bit wryly. “Be funny if you split up right after you came out to the whole town, wouldn’t it.”

He glares at her.

“Sorry, I mean it wouldn’t _actually _be funny, just be a bit ironic,” she clarifies, backpeddling.

He starts pushing his food around his plate the way Fred does when he’s tired and cranky.

“Right, then, I’ll leave you to it,” Daisy says, gathering up her things.

“Sorry, Daiz.” He sighs and looks at her apologetically.

She kisses his cheek, and heads up to her room.

Before bed, he sends Ellie a text. It takes him twenty minutes to decide what to say. But in the end he just lands on: **Love you.**

A few hours later, he finally falls asleep, not having received a response.

The next day, Ellie calls out of work sick.

He knows she’s not. He doesn’t call her.

*

Ellie spends the day in bed. Sleeping, mostly. It’s far preferable to _thinking _so she has no trouble doing it. She checks her phone once in awhile, looking at his text message from last night. **Love you.**

She picks up Fred from nursery in the afternoon herself, and the child is beyond thrilled. She plays with him all afternoon until Tom gets home from school and then practice. She orders takeaway and thanks to Fred, they make a big mess of it.

Tom volunteers to help clean things up, for once, as she wipes Fred down from head to toe.

“Where’s Alec been?” Tom asks, suddenly. “Not seen him since Sunday morning.”

“Oh, just been busy, love,” Ellie replies. “Right, come on then, Fred, to bed with you.”

“Want Alec to do it,” the four-year-old says with a pout.

“Not tonight, my little love,” she says patiently, lifting him off his chair.

“Want Alec to read _Wild Things_,” Fred insists, referring to _Where the Wild Things Are_. “Alec does it the best. ‘LET THE WILD RUMPUS START’!”

She takes his hand, leading him out of the kitchen. “Another time.”

After Fred is safely tucked away in bed, and Tom has retreated to his room, Ellie surprises herself and phones her sister. Lucy is there in fifteen minutes, thrilled to be summoned for something other than child-minding. 

The two sisters finish a bottle of wine between them, and Ellie cries in Lucy’s lap. Something she hasn’t done in thirty years. Lucy leaves around eleven.

And arrives at Alec’s door by 11:15.

Alec tries not to scowl automatically when he opens the door to find her there.

“You should go over there,” Lucy says plainly.

He almost asks where, but he knows.

“She doesn’t want me to,” he replies.

“Too bloody bad. You need to go over there." 

He sighs and shakes his head. “Can’t do that.”

Lucy’s eyes turn fiery. “Listen to me, Hardy. If you love her, and you'd better, you’ll go over there. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter.”

With that, Lucy is gone again.

Alec leaves a note on the kitchen table for Daisy in case she wakes up, then gets into the car.

Ellie’s door is unlocked, as it too often is, though he has a key just in case. He finds her in the living room, asleep on the couch. He lets himself believe for a moment that everything is normal between them. That he’ll wake up her gently, they’ll walk up to her bedroom hand in hand, fall asleep watching _Midsummer Murders_, and in the morning she’ll rouse him early to make love.

Instead, he goes into her kitchen to make her a cup of tea, and does all of her dishes while he waits for the kettle to boil. Back in the living room, he sets two mugs down on the coffee table, and now he’s close enough he can see she’s been crying. Lucy must have been with her. His heart aches.

He sits on the edge of the couch and rubs her back for a minute. “Ellie,” he whispers. He wants to kiss her, anywhere, but he knows she doesn’t want him to. If nothing else, he can respect her wishes, even if he doesn’t understand them. “El?” 

She writhes a bit, and when she opens her eyes sleepily, she’s smiling at him. “Hi,” she says hoarsely, but full of adoration. She reaches out to touch his cheek, and it’s clear to him that she’s forgotten herself, disoriented by sleep.

“Hi there, love,” he replies, smiling into her hand, grateful for the moment though he suspects it’ll be brief.

“Love,” she repeats contentedly, basking in the glow of the sound.

He nods. “”s what you are.”

She reacts to that like a cat to sunlight. He can see, at least, that she still feels the same way about him.

And then her face falls, she pulls her hand away, and she starts to cry. At the sight of her, he thinks he might too, but he doesn’t. He keeps rubbing her back gently and sighs. “Oh, my love.” He reaches out to smooth back her hair. “Will you not just _tell _me what it is that’s botherin’ you?”

She sits up, wiping at her eyes. “’S too bloody stupid, too pitiful. _Oh poor Ellie and her muddled little tragic life, what a mess she’s made of it all. _Just awful. _What can she possibly know about love? _What right have I to even try?”

He’s frowning, desperate to make sense of what she’s saying through sobs. “Ellie, I…”

“I was in love with a paedophile for thirteen years, Alec!” She exclaims, finally. “A man who became a _murderer_. I _loved _him, I shared my most intimate moments with him, I bore him _two children_, two _boys. _He murdered a child and got back into my bed. He made love to me while I was investigating the murder _he _committed and I was none the wiser. He touched me with the same hands that strangled Danny and I…”

He’d thought she’d worked through so much of this already. But, he realizes, with _their _relationship now in the mix, the context is different. It’s _so _different. And she has to reckon with it a second time.

“I can’t possibly trust myself with something like that again. With love. With…bringing another person into my children’s lives. I clearly can’t…I don’t know how to do it right. I thought I did, I thought I was good at it, good at love, but my love is probably the reason Danny is dead, and – “

“No.” He’s listening and content to let her talk as much as she wants, but not that. “Ellie, no.”

“If I had been able to see it, if my love had….worked differently, I could have seen him for what he was. I cannot _blind _myself like that again, Alec, do you see, I cannot…_do _this. Love is wasted on me, I misuse it, I am _not _to be trusted.”

Her hands are covering her face, though she’s stopped crying by now.

“I know, I_know _you are not Joe, you’re not him, but…” She continues. “That doesn’t change who _I _am. I’m still the Ellie that married a murderer.”

Part of him wants to stay quiet, just let her get everything out. He’s afraid of saying the wrong thing, of pushing her farther away. But he can’t do it.

“But Ellie, you’re not. He wasn’t a murderer when you married him, and don’t tell me that’s semantics, it’s _something_,” he says intently. “For all we know Joe wasn’t sick then. And he certainly wasn’t a murderer.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, exactly the way she tells her kids not to.

“Ellie, look at me, will you please.” His gaze is searing. “If you’re not able to trust yourself right now, that’s fine, you’ll get there. In the meantime, you’re goin’ to have to trust _me_.”

She shakes her head. “It’s too much for you to take on.” 

“Daisy and I are movin’ into this house next week,” Alec says firmly. “Our kids are gonna do the rest of their growin’ up together, and we’re gonna do the rest of our growin’ old together. That’s it and that’s final. I’ll not hear any further protestations on the matter.”

She’s finally looking straight at him now, starkly, a bit taken aback. She blinks a few times, then rearranges herself to sit on her knees and face him properly.

“You’re an awfully beautiful man, Alec Hardy.”

“Well _that’s _takin’ it a bit too far,” he says, returning to his grumpy self.

She takes his face in her hands. “No, it’s not.” She kisses him then, and Alec is acutely aware that it’s been two whole days since they’ve done this. It feels like a millenia.

He raises a hand to the nape of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair, and his other hand falls to her stitched up hip. He rests his forehead against hers. “I am madly in love with you, Ellie Miller,” he whispers. “And there’s not one sodding thing you can do about it.”

She nods, tears in her eyes, and kisses him again. “I do trust you, you know.” She keeps kissing him, and he doesn’t get to respond. 

He pulls her into his lap as they kiss. He can’t get her close enough. She kisses her way from his jawline to his cheek to his temple. “I’m sorry,” she says, barely audible.

“Shh.” He brushes her hair back and kisses her eyelid.

She buries her face in his neck and he just holds her, pressing his mouth to her shoulder.

After a few minutes, she pulls back to look him in the eye. “Stay tonight?”

He shrugs a little. “Nah, best be gettin’ on.”

Her eyes widen, and he breaks into a mischievous grin. She whacks his shoulder playfully. “Wanker.”

In her bedroom, he insists upon undressing her himself, and she lets him. He finds one of her cotton slips and pulls it down over her head. He presses a kiss to her chest, her clavicle, her throat. She goes into the loo to wash her face and brush her teeth, and he strips down to his briefs. He gets into bed, into what is now considered his side, and when she joins him, she’s fresh-faced and free of tears stains, and she smells like toothpaste. They both lie flat on their backs, staring at the ceiling. She takes his hand, interlocking their fingers.

“What made you come by tonight?” She asks.

“Lucy made me.”

She smiles, though he can’t see it. “Thank you.”

Ellie turns onto her side to look at him and runs her fingers lightly over his chest. “I missed you.”

She inches over a little closer, and presses a kiss to his ribcage. Her palm lies flat on his stomach as she continues to plant kisses on his chest. He strokes her upper back lightly with his fingertips, enjoying the feeling of her warm lips on his skin. She slides up a bit to suck at his throat, her hand beginning to wander. He reaches with his free hand to stroke the side of her breast lazily.

“Alec,” she says curiously, against his skin. Then she looks up at him. “When was the last time you showered?” 

“Wha?” His hand is running up her thigh now, underneath her white cotton slip, and he is really only interested in that.

“You’ve not been here for three days, why do you smell like _my _body wash?” She questions, pressing her nose to his collarbone.

“Uh.” He hesitates. She looks at him again, eyes questioning. “I bought it. Yesterday. I bought a bottle of the damn thing.” She’s grinning now. “I missed you too, all right?" 

Ellie kisses his lips softly. “Sweet.”

She moves over him, straddling his waist. He slides his hands up her thighs, underneath the fabric of her slip as she pushes its straps off her shoulders, freeing her arms from them. She then pushes the garment down, revealing her breasts. His hands squeeze her thighs as he takes in the sight of her, and to her delight she can feel him getting harder by the second.

That night when they make love it’s slow, impossibly slow, as if they have all the time in the world. He wants to taste every inch of her skin, and she needs her hands to be in constant contact with his body. They take their time on each other, and she falls in love with him again more times than she can count. They fall asleep holding hands, and they wake up holding hands.

The next morning, at Fred o’clock, a small boy pokes his head into his mother’s room and, upon seeing Alec, darts back out. Thirty seconds later he returns with his copy of _Where the Wild Things Are _and climbs up onto the bed.

“LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!”

***


End file.
